 Thank you very much both Vikram and Ram for arranging for this lecture. So what I want to do is to talk a little bit about some of the concepts underlying identity policy. Talk a little bit about some of the experiences that we faced in the UK to give a bit of context to the particular experiences that the UK faced. And then to talk about some of the broader issues of identity policy as they relate to issues of welfare and social inclusion. Particularly because that's one of the claims that the UID programme has. I'm more than happy to answer any questions that anybody has because I'm sure the things that I decided to include in my presentation will leave a whole series of things that people want further questions about as well. So more than happy to take questions as and when required. Perhaps it will be a little bit helpful to explain my intellectual backgrounds. I'm based at the London School of Economics which is the UK's premier social science institution. I'm in the department of management but I'm in the information systems group which means I have an interest and a background in computing technology. I'm actually programme. Not brilliantly but I can programme. I think about the organisational and managerial consequences of technology. So Ron mentioned the work we've been doing recently about cloud computing and you can look at cloud computing just in terms of virtualised servers. But you can also look at them in terms of the organisational issues, the skill sets that you need to manage moves to the cloud etc. So that's very much where I place myself. The department, the group sees itself as doing the social study of ICTs and in particular the focus that the identity policy relates to is the role of ICTs in the public sphere. As mentioned we wrote this report in 2005 looking into the UK ID card scheme and as we've been following the ongoing path of the UK scheme we were writing papers and we put those together in the book that you can see on the right. Let's start with just a simple question about identity policy. So a very simple one is who am I? You've had some people introducing me but on what basis do you trust them? Other than the two introducers I don't think I've met any of you before so how do you know who I am? How do you know that I'm Edgar Whitley who's an academic base at the LSE? How do you know if you are a government department that I'm Edgar Whitley and I'm entitled to some tax credits? Maybe you're an organisation that sends out leaflets and I've said that I'm Edgar Whitley and I'd like you to send me a leaflet. How do you know? How important is it? Maybe I'm actually Mickey Mouse and I've been invited to give this presentation. There is a bit of a giveaway but how do you know that I'm not actually Mickey Mouse? How do you know that I'm not actually Ed Whitley which is a common misspelling of my name and a miss abbreviation of my name? But that's very common so lots of people know me as Ed Whitley rather than Edgar Whitley but they still think it's me. Maybe I'm Farg in World of Warcraft or some online game. How do you know? Maybe I'm just someone who wants to post some comments about the beauty of Mumbai and what a lovely city it is. The key issue, that's Mickey Mouse, that's not me. So the questions become how do you know who I am and perhaps more importantly do you or should you care? In many contexts certainly in the UK you don't need to know who I am for me to be able to post comments to an online newspaper. In some countries that becomes a requirement. In the online game knowing who I am has nothing really to do with my real world identity. It simply has to do with my game based identity. Knowing who I am if you want to post a leaflet to me doesn't really require very much checking. You might if your conscious of cost check that the address exists but you don't care whether it's written to Bill Clinton or Edgar Whitley or whatever. You've just got to post the leaflet to the particular address. If you're dealing with tax returns and tax credits then you start to get a little bit more uneasy. You need to have a little bit more confidence that the person that you're interacting with is really the person that they claim to be. So this question of who you are and how do you know becomes very, very significant. So I've said that I'm an academic at LSE, different levels of service. So I could show you my LSE library card. Let me show you it's slightly larger. Anybody recognise the face? Is it me isn't it? I mean bit more hair, bit fatter face. Would anybody trust that as a proof that I'm an academic at LSE? Well there's a little bit of a problem that that library card expired. So even if it had at one point in time been a valid proof of ID issued by the LSE and we assume that you know what LSE ID cards really look like. You shouldn't be accepting that because it's no longer valid. But it's okay. They issued me with a brand new library card, valid until 2018. And although the enrolment process has a camera for all of the new students so that they can take their photo, because they already had a photo on the system they just used the old photo of me. It's a little bit clearer because the card hasn't been worn out by being used in the library turnstiles. Is that me? Would you be prepared? Okay LSE ID maybe that's not what you're prepared to accept. How about a driving licence? Anybody accept a UK issued driving licence? Well again this one expired so you shouldn't be accepting that one either. You should in fact be relying on this one where the photo was taken at the end of October and I looked particularly grim in it. But perhaps the photo looks a little bit closer to what I look like at the moment. The UK driving licence has a number of security features. You can see the embossing over the photograph. You can see that the ID number is marked there. There's some very fine printing. So if you were really concerned about me having a fake ID, possibly if I was younger to get served alcohol or whatever, there are various things that you can do to check whether or not this really is a valid ID once the date is correct. Except even in that case it doesn't always work perfectly. This is a beautiful news story from the Irish Republic where they discovered that there was one driver of Polish origin who seemed to be the world's worst driver with regards to traffic offences in Ireland. Because when they kind of did a spreadsheet tabulation they found that time and time and time again this driver called Prarrow-Jasdy was the driver who had been charged with speeding and parking offences and driving under the influence a whole series of different offences all being committed by Prarrow-Jasdy. Except that's not his name. That's actually the Polish for driving licence. And so the Irish police had looked for something that looks like it's a name. So it's got two parts to the first bit and a second bit. It looks a bit like a name and had decided that that was the name. So it's not the first name in the surname, it's just the words for driving licence. You'll actually look very closely the new style driving licence has it up there but not in a bit where it gets confused with the person's name. You'll notice also that that photo is black and white. There was a father of three in the UK who spent four months in jail because he was wrongly accused of having a fake driving licence. He was picked up by the authorities. The authorities asked for proof of ID. He showed them his government issued driving licence. The only thing was that his government issued driving licence had a colour photograph on it which was actually permitted under the older versions of the photo card driving licence. The police who had stopped him had forgotten about or never been informed about that particular requirement. And because he was a suspicious character who was possibly at risk of being an illegal immigrant and then if not held in prison would go underground and would just disappear from the systems. It was assumed that his driving licence was faked but he foolishly stuck a colour photo on it rather than the black and white photo and therefore he was kept in prison. Eventually somebody pointed out that the driving licence of the age that he had was allowed to have a colour photograph. So there's this real issue that even if you have a state issued ID you need to make sure that everybody who is using it for real purposes not just that it looks a bit like you or you've got something in your hand that looks like it's got a photo on it so it will let you in. Something that is a state issued ID you need to make sure that everybody knows what the valid state issues IDs are because otherwise it becomes completely meaningless and you start throwing people in prison because they've got one that's not like the one that you think they should have. The next level up for state issued credentials state issued document is the passport and here typically you get increasingly sophisticated levels of security increasingly sophisticated levels of protection. A variety of different things are done in the passport you can see the really fine printing you can see the multicolored imagery you can see the embossing over the photograph making it very difficult to replace the photograph. If you ever take a modern passport into a nightclub that has ultraviolet light you will see that there's various bits of ultraviolet ink in there as well. These are all the kinds of things that border guards check when they look at the passport and they flick through a few pages so they're either just looking at the photo card or they're doing a couple of other checks that they know make it increasingly likely that the passport in front of them is a genuine one. Just one of the tricks that you can check when you look at your passports if you have a passport at home is the fonts that are used on the passport numbers. If you look very very closely the font size for letters is slightly different to the font size for numbers. When you've been told this it becomes completely obvious and you tell your imaginary fake passport creator conscious of the video cameras that you don't obviously have passport fakers but if you were to have one one of the things that you can tell them is make sure that the font size for the number is slightly smaller than the font size for sorry, for the letter it's slightly smaller than the font size for the number because that's one of those things that once you know it you can immediately spot whether or not it's a fake passport or a passport that hasn't got that particular safety check in it. There are lots more, some of which I know but many of which they weren't even allowed to tell me. So there's that first question when you're thinking about identifying someone different kinds of identification different levels of security different levels of checking it's very difficult to get a British passport because a British passport has one of those advantages that many countries give you a visa or don't even require a visa if you have a British passport therefore there's an incredible incentive for people to either apply for a passport that they're not entitled to or create a fake passport that looks like a British passport and so the UK identity and passport service spends a lot of time making sure that it issues passports only to those people that are entitled to them and a lot of time building in security measures to make sure that with a bit of knowledge you can check whether or not it is actually a valid passport. But that issue of risk and the different levels of risk and the different amount of work that you're prepared to do is a very important one for thinking about identity policy more generally. So I want to move on to my own particular interest in identity issues. How come I'm here to talk to you about this kind of stuff? So as Ram mentioned the UK in around about 2004 introduced proposals to introduce a biometric identity card based around a centralized government database which would hold details both of all of the identity cards and the biometrics that were issued plus an audit trail that would provide details of every time you had formally checked that the identity card was valid. Now the flash and go type check where you just show somebody an ID card and it looks legitimate or you flick it and it has the right sound wouldn't obviously check it on the audit trail. But any time that you were going to do a formal check perhaps by putting the card in a card reader or presenting your biometric they wouldn't just check whether or not the card was valid they'd also check against the database that the data that was held there was correct. And the system would then provide an audit trail of every time that had happened which has very interesting privacy implications because if that audit trail shows Edgar going to the health clinic on Monday and on Wednesday and on Friday and you know that that health clinic is actually the sexual health clinic then you've automatically inferred interesting features about my lifestyle from the fact that I'm regularly attending this sexual health clinic. But more generally there was a whole series of concerns that both those academics and conversations with industry colleagues and lawyers etc got us really concerned that the government was presenting the argument and the evidence for ID cards as straightforward and unproblematic when all the people we were talking to were saying it's not such a great idea there are problems, there are issues that you need to take into consideration. So for example one of the concerns was if you have a single database with all of the details of every UK citizen on it that's going to be a fantastic target for hackers why bother to break into banks when you can get the identity data of 60 million people in the UK. There were questions about the potential benefits if the ID card was there to stop identity fraud and benefit fraud what was the actual evidence of how much fraud was going on and how much of that fraud could actually be addressed by having an identity card so one of the examples that was being argued for by government was that identity cards would stop fraudulent welfare benefits benefit payments of benefit fraud the only slight and sort of sorry to be an academic and point this out to you the evidence was that the vast majority of benefit fraud taking place in the UK had nothing to do with false identities but everything to do with misrepresentation of circumstances so in practice the vast majority of benefit fraud did not involve Edgar going to five different towns to claim benefit under five different names because that's just too much work and the benefit payments even in the UK are not that great what would be easier would be to come along and say this is Edgar claiming benefit and I've got four children rather than three children and I'll get a little bit of extra payment for that fourth child having an ID card that says this is definitely Edgar isn't going to address that level of fraud so what the purposes were and what was actually happening is an important distinction that we weren't saying that they were wrong we're just saying if you're claiming this well this is what the evidence says this is what the consequences are going to be we also had raised concerns about biometrics about the practical consequences of collecting the biometrics who wouldn't be able to give biometrics etc and also the practical consequences of verifying the biometrics because even if you've got people enrolled using their biometrics if you are doing a high security transaction where you need to check that the fingerprint of the person in front of you is actually the fingerprint of the person with the ID card then you need to have a secure fingerprint reader it needs to have a secure connection to the database you need to have trained staff you need to have security accredited trained staff and all of these little details had to the cost because let's say that you're a bank and you want to make sure that you are actually checking the fingerprints of your customer well you can't just have one trained member of staff who's been suitably accredited because they go on holiday, they get sick you've got to have at least two so that's two people that have got to have those security checks then you've got to have the secure connection etc all of these things start to add up and so that was one of the other things in our report was that we raised concerns about the overall cost of the scheme suggesting that the cost was higher than the government had actually said it was going to be it turned out later on that these higher costs were for two reasons one, because they hadn't included all of these extra little bits that were actually really important and second, because they'd only decided to report the costs to the department that was issuing them and the other government department that wished to use ID cards for their own purposes would have to bear the cost themselves and that wasn't in their headline figure so our estimates said if you do a proper costing of the cost to government, which is what citizens care about not the cost to the home office which is what the home office cares about you get roughly twice as much to four times as much cost so the government was saying about five billion and we said 10, 15 or 20 and we had a range of measures because it could be that there's mass public opposition lots of people failing to enrol lots of technical problems getting the systems up and running so you have a high cost all things could go reasonably well all things could go really as well as you have told us that your IT systems are going to be and of course the UK has such a fantastic record of IT systems implementation we don't write off millions of pounds of projects every year so we had a range of figures the government had one figure and it was absolutely sure that one figure was going to be the cost to itself no possibility of variation or whatever so as I say we had all of these different kinds of concerns and we put them together in our report this was 300 plus pages long it had 80 plus people as named contributors and we had a series of further people who had contributed but didn't want to or couldn't be named because of who they worked for or whatever so for example the chapter on the technical security of the system had been reviewed by one of the Ministry of Defence's technical operators technical specialists about computer security he couldn't put his name to the report at the time but it did reveal that it was him that had written that particular chapter at a later stage because of this concern about costs because the government was not prepared to even entertain the possibility that their cost estimates were wrong Parliament insisted that every six months they issue an updated estimate of how much they had spent and how much they were going to spend over the next ten years which meant that if nothing else had happened with the scheme every six months they had to do something the press had a story I had another opportunity to say well this is completely meaningless they've talked about spending this much but they've not done anything yet but it wasn't just the LSE report that had an impact on the overall public perception of ID cards in the UK and this is an extract from a document from the Department of Constitutional Affairs looking into the idea of increased data sharing between government departments so the logic is in order to provide a better service to citizens different government departments will share the details so if the health department knows that you've had a child we tell the tax department that you get extra credits and maybe we tell the education department that in five years time the child will enter school so the statement says we recognise that the more we share information the more important it is that people are confident that their personal data is kept safe and secure this government has an excellent track record of strengthening individuals rights of privacy few months after this the Majesty's Revenue and Customs the taxation department sent two compact discs containing the details of every family that was claiming child benefit to the National Audit Office the National Audit Office wanted to check that the Revenue and Customs was dealing with tax child benefit payments in the right way they had asked for a sample of data but somebody in HMRC decided the easiest way was to just do copy star dot star extract all of the details of absolutely everybody and put it onto a CD stick it into the internal post to the National Audit Office the CDs never arrived but it's an interesting side story that says well maybe possibly they were never actually sent you could imagine the situation it's Friday evening your boss says could you extract this data and send it to the National Audit Office you get distracted, you meet your friends you forget to do it Monday morning the boss goes have you sent those discs to the National Audit Office you say of course I have phone's National Audit Office have you received the discs no ah we would better send them we've still not received them we've got the second set of discs that you've sent but the first set are still not arrived if we're very lucky they were never sent if we're quite lucky they're at the back of a post room somewhere where they slid behind filing cabinets and if we're really unlucky they're in the hands of a criminal gang who have the details of every family in the UK and every child that they have we're just waiting for the right opportunity to use that data to commit widespread fraud because if you know the names, the national insurance numbers the ages of the children, the date of birth etc etc you're basically made understandably when the minister stands up and says in parliament I'm really sorry but we appear to have mislaid the data on 25 million families in the UK the press have a field date so variety of cartoons this is my favourite one we've lost the disc containing every child's name and address we can't deliver them Christmas presents remember the government is saying we're building this computer system which will hold all of your identity data and we're going to keep it really really secure we had said we're not sure that you were up to doing it they had demonstrated that they were not up to doing it public support starts to wither away at that point in fact it withers away to such an extent that by the time we come to the general election in 2010 turns out that every single political party except for one which was the Labour party, the party in government vowed to scrap ID cards as part of their manifesto commitments the mainstream opposition parties the Green Party the Scottish Nationalists the Welsh Nationalists right through to the racist extreme the English Defence League etc all had as one of their populist policy commitments or well fought through properly argued policy commitments to scrap ID cards the only party that still wanted them and even they were probably preparing to ditch them if necessary was the Labour Party the Labour Party we say didn't win the election and the Conservative Party didn't win the election so there was this talk about can we get a coalition government it was very interesting David Cameron the Conservative leader had as a back bench MP as a junior minister member of parliament being on the committee that had reviewed the original identity cards bill he had actually come as a back bench MP to a meeting at LSE literally the organisers had said who's on the committee oh well we won't get the famous people let's go for somebody lower down on the list someone that no one's heard of and somebody kept a recording of that public lecture of that meeting and there's a nice description of him saying I know that we're supposed to be impartial we're just looking at the legislation per se but personally I have serious reservations when he became leader his opponent for leadership was David Davis who had been the interior minister the shadow home office minister who had been leading the opposition to the ID card scheme in the parliamentary debate so whoever won the election opposed to ID cards the Liberal Democrats also had been strongly opposed to identity cards and Nick Clegg the then Liberal Democrat leader had previously had responsibility for opposing ID cards when he was there home affairs spokesman as well so you can imagine it Labour hasn't won people are a bit hacked off with Labour trying to become into power Nick Clegg, David Cameron the coalition this might actually work what policies should we start to discuss taxation policies let's not do that one first scrapping ID cards, agreed, agreed that's the first item on our political agenda we're agreed, coalition agreement let's now worry about the next levels down so the coalition agree scrap ID cards it's the first piece of legislation that they introduce into the new government took a while to get resolved because the Labour Party still said people have bought an ID card to get refund it got a bit complicated they also said we are so concerned about the privacy implications of the previous screen that we are really not confident that simply erasing the details on the database is going to be sufficient we are really concerned that somebody might be able to as you might find if you buy a second hand computer unarrays all sorts of data that's on the thing so the only way that they could be confident that the previous screen was completely gone was by physical destruction of the database so there's YouTube clips of the Home Office Minister throwing hard disk drives into an industrial grade crusher to make sure that this data could never be used again new government no longer having a national ID card scheme doesn't mean the problem of identifying yourself online particularly and for government services particularly goes away so the question comes how do we make progress we don't want to do it that way what can we do to make things more straight forward how can we get identity policy working in the UK given this political history so they set up what they call the identity assurance program and whereas the previous government refused to show up or disagreed violently with the work that we've been doing the new government has actively involved in helping with the discussions for the idea assurance program it's called identity assurance partly it's a linguistic distinction but it's also a useful marker for the change in attitude that the new set of proposals is intended to have and one of the things that the government did was commissioned a report by Sir James Crosby and he wrote a report where he said if you want to differentiate different ways of looking at identity one of them will call identity management and identity management is a system that has an approach to serve the interests of whoever owns the database of identities typically the government it's about making things easier for government things like data sharing etc etc it's okay identity assurance says actually this should be a consumer or a citizen led thing if we are doing identity policy it should be around the needs of the individual not around the needs of the government Sir James Crosby has a background in banking so that's why he talked about consumers rather than citizens but his emphasis is very clear it's a consumer or citizen led concept a process that meets important consumer needs without necessarily providing any spin off benefits for the owner of any database identity in the identity assurance view is all about the benefits to you as an individual not the benefits to the government or the issuer of the identity credential it's about the benefits to you and that's where the indian example starts to get interesting so this is an adhar UID official document going forward adhar will form the basic universal identity infrastructure over which registrar's government and other service providers across the country will be able to build their identity based applications any mention of customers consumers these features in turn are expected to serve a developmental mandate to potentially achieve multiple transformational benefits of development and equitable growth through so sort of towards the consumers and the citizens proper identification leading to better targeting of development schemes provided by government and private sector so it's about the government getting the target of targeting of benefits not the individual being able to get the benefits that they are entitled to ensuring that all fake and ghost records are weeded out from databases so that leakages resulting from such records are avoided that has nothing to do with you and me that has to do with the government systems not being very good so no benefits there increasing reach and efficiency presumably government efficiency in delivering many goods and services like PDS banking financial services etc and then finally something that might be of benefit to the citizen no repeated know your customer checks for residents so lots of things that are there for the owners of the database very little and at the bottom of the list and potentially not a significant feature of your entire existence the know your customer checks identity assurance this other way of thinking about it is there about the important consumer need without necessarily any benefits to the owner of the database so following the election we have a very different perspective UK identity policy is aligned to first of all the policy commitments of both coalition partners they were emphasizing privacy they were emphasizing the rolling back of the surveillance capabilities of the state for liberal and conservative views so there is an interesting political mishmash but both of them essentially were saying we don't like surveillance liberals because surveillance is wrong and conservatives because that's not what the government should be doing and in particular it's not going to be based around a government held database of identity data it also recognises that unlike the previous government which talked about their ID card scheme being the central source of truth the government will know who you are the government is the source of truth about which I heard a UID spokesperson using exactly the same phrase a few days ago it's about well what level of assurance what level of guarantee do you need do you need to know absolutely that I'm Edgar Whitley born on this day at this place in order for me to take advantage of facilities offered by a local authority I know sports facilities you might need to know all of that detail to issue me with a passport but that doesn't mean that you need to all of that detail to issue me with a permit to use the local sports facilities so different levels of assurance different service providers maybe somebody can provide the guarantees for high levels and somebody else can provide guarantees for low levels it's moving to a market of identity providers there are lots of commercial organisations in the UK that know quite a lot about me my bank knows where I live and has done various checks before it gave me credit etc etc it knows its customer my mobile phone company knows less about me it doesn't know that I'm over 18 so it doesn't let me browse over 18 websites via my phone but they do know that I've been paying the bill and the letters that they've been sending to my home address have been being delivered and not being returned so they know me to a certain level of assurance the bank knows me to a different level of assurance why not use my mobile phone my mobile phone provider to log on to some government services and my bank credential to log on to others it's a very interesting different way of thinking about identity to say given the political background of both parties in the coalition privacy is a very important characteristic one of the key groups in the program is a group called the privacy and consumer group and we have the right we don't quite have the right to red flag and stop a particular part of government doing something stupid that's against privacy or against consumer groups but we can certainly request that they come and speak to us and explain what they're trying to do and hear why we think these things are bad for privacy etc this privacy and consumer group has developed a set of principles just three of them here to show you this idea of putting the citizen at the centre of the UK's new proposals so identity assurance activities only take place if I agree to them so you can't it's not the government saying we've got this data and we're going to use it in these kinds of ways I have to agree for the data to be used in those ways I will agree to that because I have a good understanding of what's happening it's transparent to me it's very clear who has access who doesn't have access if there are exceptional circumstances which there will be I know who is in charge of overseeing those exceptional circumstances etc the only people who can participate in that scheme have been accredited they have been properly audited and guaranteed to provide proper services and if there start to be reports that they're not doing a good job they get kicked out they are no longer able to participate so if it were to be the case that they were issuing ID cards or ID credentials to Coriander they would now be excluded from the scheme this idea of accredited and documented individuals and different levels of documentation becomes again interesting in the Indian case again this is a another recent UID document this is about using ATAR for telecommunications services what's particularly interesting and this is straight from their documentation is who are they targeting for the number they are targeting either the people with no documents or people with poor documents so immediately you've got a very different situation to the UK where the UK now is using existing documents to provide different levels of assurance and that's one of the areas where clearly the UK and India are completely different the idea of having large numbers one third of the population potentially if this I'm sure isn't meant to be representational but it's not an insignificant proportion having no documents that just doesn't happen in the UK you have records about people most people to a greater or lesser extent it's certainly not like that UID is explicitly targeting people who can't identify themselves already so it's really addressing a welfare scenario the objectives of inclusion and security can be mutually exclusive at times greater security demands stronger subscriber verification methods subscribers are verified using know your customer documentation which requires submission of proof of identity and proof of address so the people who have no documents saying who they are or where they live or poor documents saying who they are and where they live are not are going to fall foul of these requirements individuals lacking these documents get excluded exclusion immediately from telecom services or resort providing fake documents to get access to services so it starts to raise a question if you are accepting fake documents or if you have no way of checking if they are fake documents doesn't that completely undermine the security requirement but that's a separate discussion use of improper identity documentation for telecom connections is common and has been widely reported in the press and in fact the government requires that telecoms providers do audits and try to improve the quality of their documentation but this does realise and reveal a very important consumer need namely if you want to have full participation in the economic and social life of a society then proper documentation becomes an increasingly important aspect of that and this is where you could see addressing identification is potentially helping so just as a term the idea of legal identity is recognition by the state that an individual exists and is therefore afforded various rights and responsibilities so if you have a legal identity which is not the same as a unique number a legal identity then you start to get all sorts of opportunities in society what kinds of benefits the easiest ways to think about these benefits is to think about how difficult it is for people who don't have proper legal identity education what proof of legal identity is required in order to be given the opportunity for education varies from country to country are you given access to health care if you cannot prove that you are a citizen of the country what about social security and welfare benefits what about voting and franchisement if the state doesn't recognise you then you are not entitled to vote what about banking and credit if you don't have a legal identity then getting banking and credit can be very difficult and even things like property titles and inheritance you claim that this land is owned by your father but there's no record that you are the child you have no official identity therefore you are not entitled to the inheritance of that property so the lack of identity gets all sorts of exclusions coming along and I suppose we should also add legal access to telecom services because having a mobile phone is one of those human rights that everybody perhaps should have but certainly the way it's set up in India if you don't have legal documentation if you don't have a legal identity you get all of those kinds of problems this is actually a legal requirement when convention on the rights of the child says that every child should be registered immediately after birth and should have the right from birth to a name the right to acquire a nationality and as far as possible the right to know and be careful by his or her parents and here is a signatory of that convention plan international estimates that 51 million children a year are not registered at birth so that's 51 million children a year not being afforded those kinds of legal identity rights for a whole series of reasons not realising that registration is important the cost of the registration process the difficulties if you didn't register them at the birth going along and proving that the child was registered etc all sorts of things and of course as with all forms of exclusion and discrimination if you are female if you are rural if you are in certain echelons of society the levels of under registration are going to be far higher this is an example from plan international for Shahidah a young girl from Dakar early parental pressure to get married was an inevitable reality but a birth certificate which showed she was just 15 years old saved her from getting married too young if you have that legal identity that recognition by the state that you exist a birth certificate then your life is potentially transformed in Jamaica I was in Jamaica a couple of weeks ago the birth registration rate is about 89% of under fives have been registered again rural or etc the vast majority of that one of the very direct consequences of a lack of birth registration is if you don't have a birth certificate you can't graduate to high school and obviously if you can't graduate to high school you're immediately in a very different path through society so getting that birth registration getting the civil registration process sorted becomes absolutely core for development India looking at the figures this afternoon fewer than 55% of all births are registered about 14 million out of 26 million births a year not being registered so yes we want identification but maybe getting birth registration sorted out might be a more effective way of addressing many of the development goals that India faces what are the reasons for low registration this is a plan international report lack of public awareness no demand for civil registration documents and the use of alternate documents such as school leaving certificates voter identity cards etc of proof of date and proof of birth is widespread but if you haven't got a birth certificate these documents become meaningless become fakeable so that girl's parents could have given her a school leaving certificate and said made her a year older than she actually was so there's all sorts of things that can happen in those kinds of circumstances so if you want to address development if you want to address issues of inclusion and exclusion policies are important just as in the UK we're not saying that the ability to identify yourself for example online to access government services we're not saying don't do that the LSE report simply said don't do it that way similar concerns are being raised in India about the UID it's not about don't have a means of identifying people it's about what are the practical consequences of doing it in that way so identity policy needs to be done right to address issues of exclusion I want to suggest that a very useful way of thinking about that is one that focuses on the needs of the citizen rather than the needs of the government and there are lots of different ways in which that can be achieved and if you do an identity policy badly as the previous government did in the UK then that has consequences both politically everybody else has a policy to get rid of you I mean they lost the election for a variety of reasons but that certainly didn't help and it also has economic consequences all the money that was spent fighting LSE starting up with these schemes trying to get these people to enrol scheme was rolling for about a year anyone want to guess how many people got a UK ID card scale system for question first UK 60 million people about 40 million over 18s that would have been eligible anybody want to guess how many 15,000 that included airport workers at two small airports who had been given one because they were trying to use that as part of the way of sorting out who gets security clearance to work at airports we also suspect it includes a large number of staff members and their families working for the government department that was issuing ID cards because they desperately had to get the numbers not to look completely embarrassing and the final one sorry it's blue more than happy to take any questions now more than happy to take any questions by email later on the identity policy dot lse dot ac dot uk has all of our publications about identity policy and more general stuff should have a slash with the at the end of it so I'll